Death is inevitable. But lifelong grief shouldn’t be.
(This is an excerpt from the book I’m currently writing).
There is one thing that now seems completely common sense to me when I think about people’s grief after a death.
You see, death is inevitable. It will happen to us, no matter what, and it will happen to everyone we know and everyone we love. And no, not always at the end of a “good innings”. All of us know of mothers whose babies have miscarried, children that have died, teenagers, people in their 20’s, 30’s, 40’s and so on. And of all sorts of things, not just ‘natural causes’. In fact, what a silly phrase that is. As if anything else is unnatural – people have always died of accident, illness, and from our own and others intervention (suicide and murder). We ALL know people who have died in car accidents, of cancer, of suicide. This has always been the case and it will always be the case. Ok, maybe it will be hovercraft accidents and deaths from an illness we haven’t yet seen…but there will always be many, many deaths that aren’t just ‘from old age’.
Death happens a lot. Something like 1 in 4 preganancies are estimated to end in miscarriage (many times before a woman even realises she is pregnant). From that perspective and stats that reflect that, dying young is actually very common indeed.
Whether we like it or not there is nothing unnatural about dying younger than expected. Yet our expectation that we are all guaranteed a life into at least our 80’s or 90’s has led to a situation where we can’t accept death, don’t prepare or plan, are shocked by it every single time it touches our lives, and are completely unable to deal with death – both our own and others.
And here is the piece I’m talking about. The part that is common sense to me about all this: how can it be possible that this inevitable thing that we can be certain we will encounter, in all it’s forms, from when we are very young to the day we die ourselves (and there’s no telling when that will be)….is meant to cause us lifelong pain? That instead of moving gracefully through and OUT of it every time, we are meant instead to carry it and carry it and carry it some more, adding grief from more and more deaths, and carry that too until the day we die? Doesn’t that just seem ridiculous? That there could be NO way to effectively deal with the suffering that occurs from the ONLY thing that you are guaranteed will happen in life, that is perfectly natural, and that will happen many times over.
I think the problem comes not from death but the fact that our society has set us up to be absolutely ill-equipped to cope with it in any way. To fear it, to be in total denial about it’s inevitability, to only see it as negative, and to expect grief to be a painful experience that we carry through our lives.
It would be a terrible flaw in the design if something we are commonly going to experience, no matter who we are, no matter where we live, no matter what era we are born into, can only damage and damage and damage us again…permanently, and that there would be no better way to deal with it.
How could that be possible?
Luckily it’s not. There isn’t a flaw. There isn’t a mistake here. We aren’t meant to go through our lives dragging ever more unhealed baggage along for the ride. And it helps a lot when you recognise that because you start thinking differently, asking different questions, and releasing your death-like grip on your grief. And these are all important tools on your journey to heal your grief completely.
Kristie
xx
